Black Smoke Trigger: Eyes On The Horizon

Think New Zealand and where does your mind wander? Is it toward rugby? Perhaps it’s the Lord Of The Rings trilogy? Modern rock big guns BLACK SMOKE TRIGGER is on a mission to make themselves the first thing you think of with the release of new album Horizons and their rebranding of a once stale genre. 

This new release has been in the making for years, with initial conception coming mid-pandemic. The band was chomping at the bit, needing to get into a recording studio to put their ideas into fruition in Nashville with legendary producer and Grammy Award winner Nick Raskulinecz. 

Travel bans and other issues led to a back and forth between the band and authorities, and it wasn’t until the third time they had rearranged their session that they could finally travel and get the first half of what would become Horizons out of the demo stages. What was supposed to just be an EP turned into a full-length album that was finally fully recorded after a few months of playing shows, chaotic visa appointments, and a total 47,000 miles travelled between New Zealand and the USA. 

The band clearly has their own sight set incredibly high, with some of the only bands that are willing to globetrot in this way being some of the biggest names in music you could hope to hear. It speaks volumes about how dedicated the group are to their music and how determined they were to make the world listen to them. 

“That’s why we called the album Horizons because it literally felt like we were chasing a horizon to get it done,” says guitarist Charlie Wallace. Many other bands would have seen this many setbacks as a sign from the universe or a divine being telling them that their dream is not to be and that it’s time to give up. Not BLACK SMOKE TRIGGER. 

The amount of schedule changes bought the band a little time to sit with some ideas and further develop what they already had. The album’s closer Promise is a track that would never have existed if not for these complications. “Things can change very rapidly in your personal life,” says Wallace. “When we first started writing the last track on the record everything was fine, but then I found out my mom had cancer, and she was going to pass away. A lot of people have written songs for people who’ve passed away and they never got to hear that song,” he continues. “I remember thinking writing it that I knew I had the next line when I would just start crying and it like ‘okay I got it, I’m hitting the nerve’.” 

BLACK SMOKE TRIGGER demonstrates the familial aspects that come with being part of a band. “Everyone in the band knows my mom pretty well. In fact, the band works out of my house effectively five days a week,” says Wallace. “My mom was living here for a significant period of time before she passed away. It’s one of those things that you can actually hear. Baldrick (vocals) and Nick were both tearing up during the actual recording of the lyrics.”

The very last thing we hear at the end of Horizons is a classical guitar piece, composed and played by Wallace. “My mom had always loved the classical excerpt called Dee that RANDY RHOADS put on Blizzard Of Oz. That was a tribute to his mom so I was like ‘you know, what’d be cool? Putting a piece of classical music on the end that little head nod to that influence.”

The recording of this piece was anything but simple. With producer Nick Raskulinecz flying home from New Zealand where the tail end of the recording took place that same day, the band were on a strict time frame. The complicated nature of recording such a piece was not lost on Wallace. “It’s not just ‘punch in’ on a classical guitar; it doesn’t work,” he says. “I’m tearing up while I’m playing – you can actually hear me breathing and stuff on the record.”

The song can take on a new meaning for anyone that listens, regardless of whether you have experienced loss or grief in your life, and that is the beauty of BLACK SMOKE TRIGGER’s music. Throughout their discography and especially on Horizons, they have taken care to write about the things that are important to them and fill them with passion, hoping that listeners feel the same way. 

There are clear powerful emotions that radiate throughout Horizons and everything that BLACK SMOKE TRIGGER puts themselves to. Their dedication to the cause of finishing what was an already difficult record, paired with the raw reactions to the events happening around them in the real world provides their audiences with a soundtrack to their own turmoil and strife. They write and produce music solely for themselves, to alleviate some of the real-world pressures they face, so they can keep trucking on toward the horizon. 

Horizons is out now via self-release.

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